Advice on new pc? - TTLG Forums

inselaffe on 14/6/2011 at 17:53

Made this as a new topic considering i didn't want to hijack the other one and also the location and therefore costs of parts is different as i'm in uk not usa. Also think we've got less to play with here. Likewise i am rather clueless about the whole thing though :$ here goes:

Okay so my dad wants to get a new computer and was looking at this: [(www.ebuyer.com]) from having a little look i would be inclined to suggest that he could probly do quite a bit better than that? or at least by buying individual components but i am not really sure?

He doesn't want to spend over £500 really but obviously i whatever is the best value. Don't need a monitor or keyboard / mouse and all that, just the actual computer. Would probly need windows 7 of some variety but oem shall be fine.

Thing is both me and him are not up to speed on what is good anymore and i was never an expert in these things.

He seems to reckon that buying individual parts is no longer that much cheaper than buying a stock pc as it was years ago but i am not sure he is correct on this matter? Basically, we are not adverse to buying parts - the only positive of buying a whole package i guess is that if it goes wrong then you don't have to be able to prove which part took out all the rest etc.

Do motherboards still come with normal PCI (not PCIe) slots these days? At least 1 for legacy? Or have they completely died out?
I say that as he would like firewire and if it's not on the motherboard then i have a pci firewire card he can have. If not i spose we can get a cheap pcie one.
(When i eventually get a new pc myself though it would be useful to have a pci slot in order to use my sound card though).

Dunno if you can get usb 3 motherboards at a decent price yet? But again i guess it's not major but nice to have.

Basically, whatever's best value and futureproof i guess really.

Thanks

Brian The Dog on 14/6/2011 at 22:10

In answer to your questions (sorry for the disjointed nature, but there's a few questions):

- Ebuyer are good, they are quite cheap and reliable. It only gets a bit awkward if you need to return anything faulty, but that's quite rare and they've got a lot better recently.

- PCs are about the same price as off-the-shelf if you are buying a standard office PC. You can get a (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/255251) desktop for about £300, a home-build for similar specs will be around the saame price. If you get to about £400, then it get's a bit cheaper to home-build, especially for reasonable graphics cards.

- Nearly all motherboards do still come with PCI slots - only the top-of-the-range have PCI-E only. Some also come with Firewire 400 ports on the back-panel as well, but you can add it via the PCI card you already have. USB 3.0 is starting to be added to motherboards, for instance (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/236462) here.

One thing you may want to watch out for is that the PS/2 connectors are being phased out, about half the motherboads seem to expect you to have USB ones now, Just something to be aware of since you're moving your older peripherals with you.

Edit, after a bit of fishing, here's a home-build PC for £500:
CPU - (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/257236) Phenom II x4 840 (4 x 3.2 GHz)
Motherboard - (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/236462) Asus M4A88T-V Socket AM3 - with USB 3.0 and a good mixture of connectors.
Memory - (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/251754) Corsair 4Gb of 2000 MHz DDR3
Graphics - (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/260608) nvidia GTX 550 Ti
Case - (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/127584) Coolermaster Elite 330
Power Supply - (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/124927) Arctic Power 700W
Hard Drive - (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/241718) Western Digital 1Tb
DVD Writer - (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/176026) LiteOn
Windows - (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/259863) Windows 7 x64

Total cost is £514.

Al_B on 14/6/2011 at 22:25

The other consideration is what he (or you) need in terms of graphics capabilities. If he's just requiring it for office work then that can make a huge difference to whether it's going to be shared by you and you're looking for high performance graphics. For basic functions then yes, a complete system can be cheaper than putting things together yourself, but if you're looking for a higher specification then I've found you can save money by purchasing components and putting it together yourself.

Brian The Dog on 14/6/2011 at 22:48

Indeed, the spec I suggest above includes a £108 graphics card, on a motherboard that already has onboard graphics. Take that off, and you can buy a similar spec PC off-the-shelf for a similar price. Such as (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/268896) this.

inselaffe on 15/6/2011 at 13:13

Thanks for the help, also been asking (http://www.grandprixgames.org/read.php?5,975572,975617) here to see how opinions compare. I assume he will want a decent graphics card as we always have had that however i will ask him to make sure - for the meantime assume so, as like you say it can easily be taken off.

Scan.co.uk seems cheaper than ebuyer, so that might help in terms of pricing. Not sure what it is like for delivery though - it appears to be £10 up to 30kg and then £9 for an extra 30kg consecutively: (http://www.scan.co.uk/information/delivery.aspx)
Seems like something that would have to be worked out what was best.

Does that motherboard you suggest internal or front connectors for firewire? I can give him my firewire card anyway, so not a huge issue.
Also usb3 is not a must really, just a nice to have future proof - but a pci card for it could be got in the future anyway.

What is better - more ram or slightly faster (1600 compared to 2000 mhz).

How does the nvidia GTX 550 Ti compare to the radeon 6770? And going up slightly with either brand (i imagine this would be to 560 gtx or 6850? or 6870? but i don't really know), would that be worth it or not? Also how does the 6830 compare to the 6770 considering i saw they were about the same price :S

Thanks for your time

Brian The Dog on 15/6/2011 at 17:56

Scan are quite good too, just go with whoever's cheapest. The motherboard I linked to has 2 Firewire sockets - one on the backpanel, and one on the motherboard that you connect the front panel up to. I'd recommend going for USB 3.0 on the motherboard rather than a PCI card. as (a) you will need a PCI-E rather than PCI card for it, as it needs more power, and (b) the PCI-E x1 slots are not able to provide enough power and so you need to connect a PCI-E card to the Power Supply via a Molex (old-style CD-ROM) connector. It's just a bit fiddly, and adding USB 3.0 doesn't add much to the motherboard cost, so I'd say go for it.

As to whether faster or more RAM is better, I guess it depends on how much more, and how much faster. 4Gb is probably enough for most things these days, although some people recommend 6Gb. After that it doesn't make much difference. I'd recommend just going for the fastest RAM you can find, it doesn't make too much price difference. 8Gb would be an ideal amount, but that would push the price above what you're willing to pay.

Edit - As for comparisons for ATI graphics cards, I have never used one since I use Linux and the ATI cards are poor in Linux. But the tables of performance on Wikipedia suggests the nvidia card is slightly higher spec (has a higher pixel rate, a slightly lower texture fill rate, and a higher bandwidth). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units) ATI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units) nvidia.

I'd go along with one thing that they said on the other website you linked to - make sure you get a decent power supply, and not a generic thing. They will last not very long, and then fry your PC. The power supply is the only thing that can fry all the components of your PC, so make sure you get a reliable one!

inselaffe on 16/6/2011 at 16:09

He's started to get more into it now he's read the suggestions and told me he feels he will probably blow the budget now to get better so it will last longer hahahaha oh dear. So it's a dangerous situation. I imagine i'll have to talk him down a bit if things arent worth the cost.
At least he's looking at it now though, so he can start making an actual choice.

Once he shows me what he's found i'll tot it up and see how much and then see what you think. Will also give me more of an idea of what he thinks he wants.
Worry about graphics card and stuff can be delayed until i know what he's thinking.
Ati ain't half confusing with the difference between the 6770 and 6830 - although from some things i'm reading i'm getting the impression that the 6830 is actually worse. Not sure.

Basically i think it was upgrades to the motherboard chipset and getting a x6 core phenom 2. I don't really know if there is any point with the latter at least though, considering that you're lucky if an application uses more than 1 core. I know stuff starts to use more now but i dunno, just a feeling i get.

Yer, i've had powersupply problems before many years ago - it's certainly something to avoid!

In terms of ram, there is:
(http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-%282x2gb%29-corsair-ddr3-xms3-classic-pc3-12800-%281600%29-non-ecc-unbuffered-cas-9-9-9-24-150v) 4gb 1600mhz ~£35-40
(http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-%282x2gb%29-corsair-ddr3-xms3-classic-pc3-16000-%282000%29-non-ecc-unbuffered-cas-9-10-9-27-165v) 4gb 2000mhz ~£50
(http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-%282x4gb%29-corsair-ddr3-xms3-pc3-12800-%281600%29-non-ecc-unbuffered-cas-9-9-9-27-165v) 8gb 1600mhz ~£65
(http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-%282x4gb%29-corsair-ddr3-xms3-pc3-16000-%282000%29-non-ecc-unbuffered-cas-9-10-9-27-165v) 8gb 2000mhz ~£100

So it seems quite a jump for higher speed when you get to 8gb but not for 4? Odd.
This may be a stupid question, but why is faster at 50 better than double the capacity at 65? I suppose you it is a choice between general system performance, where faster is better and putting it under load where it would require that extra ram and therefore the faster speed without the capacity would be moot. Tricky.
Suggestions? Thankfully it's not my choice to make :D

You say 6 is a sweet spot but i heard that if you get ram in 3 sticks then it can't run as fast as it should compared to an even number of equal ram sticks. Or is that only in certain motherboards?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Renzatic on 16/6/2011 at 18:34

One thing to keep in mind is that faster ram doesn't directly correlate to a faster machine. It all depends on what your bus is running at. The processor Brian linked to looks like it default clocks to 2000Mhz FSB, so you'll need to get the ram rated to run at that speed. If you go with DDR1600, then you'll have to run it on a bus that's clocked faster than the ram is rated for. So, in essence, you'll be overclocking your ram to get the default clock speeds out of your CPU.

On the flipside of that, if they have, say, 2400Mhz DDR3, getting that and plopping it into your 2000Mhz FSB motherboard won't make a damn bit of difference in performance. You'll be running that 2400Mhz ram at 2000Mhz. The only advantage of getting faster ram than what your processor is rated for is that it gives you more overhead to overclock later.

So basically, unless you're planning on overclocking the hell out of your machine at some point, just get the ram that matches the FSB your processor/motherboard is rated for, and don't worry about anything else.

Oh, and triple channel memory is an i7 only thing (might also be i5, I'm not sure). If you're getting a Phenom, then don't fret it.

Brian The Dog on 16/6/2011 at 20:56

What Renz said :cool: 6 sticks is optimal for the Intel i7 and i5 chips, as their motherboards have triple-channel configurations. For dual-channel systems like the AMD chips, they have dual-channel which clearly can't happen for 3 sticks of RAM, so it's best to go for 2 or 4 sticks.

For nvidia graphics cards, the first number is the series number, whilst the next two (or three) are the model number in that series (for ATI cards, this is 2 and 2 respectively). The series get better as the numbers increase, but a low number for that series will still be poor compared to a high number in the previous series. Thus an nvidia 550 is roughly about the same as a 460. A 6830 is definitely not as good as the 6770, as the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units) list of ATI chips shows.

Ostriig on 16/6/2011 at 22:37

Triple channel memory setups are indeed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-channel_architecture) exclusive to platforms equipped with Intel i7 CPUs, only the i7 Extreme lineup to be precise. It's currently available on the series 5 LGA1366 with the i7-9**, and it's expected to come to series 7 on socket LGA2011 with whatever the Sandy Bridge incarnation of the Extreme range will be called.

Quote Posted by inselaffe

Worry about graphics card and stuff can be delayed until i know what he's thinking.

What it boils down to is whether he wants to play games on it, and, if so, how keen is he on pretty visuals. While on the subject, one more thing aside from what Brian's mentioned already is that nVidia cards will come with PhysX support - for a games enthusiast that can definitely contribute to the aforementioned pretty visuals. For almost anyone else it's entirely useless.

Quote Posted by Brian The Dog

For nvidia graphics cards, the first number is the series number, whilst the next two (or three) are the model number in that series (for ATI cards, this is 2 and 2 respectively). The series get better as the numbers increase, but a low number for that series will still be poor compared to a high number in the previous series. Thus an nvidia 550 is roughly about the same as a 460. A 6830 is definitely not as good as the 6770, as the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units) list of ATI chips shows.

ATI's frustrating naming conventions aside, I'm confused, is there a desktop 6830 card? I've only seen a 6830M on that list. On the desktop side, if we're talking about the 6850 vs. the 6770, the former seems to have a more impressive sheet of tech stats, wouldn't it outperform the latter?